Tag: World War II

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Dark, by Gillian

I grew up in the dark. Quite literally. And yes, here we go again, back to the England of World War Two. (Pause for communal groan.) Born in 1942, I was three when the war ended and, along with it, the blackout regulations. So for the first three years of my life I truly had no experience, nor even concept, of artificial lights shining through the darkness outside. Every window of every single building, no matter it’s use, had to be completely covered in thick, black, material. If the tiniest chink of light showed through, one of the blackout wardens who roamed the dark streets would very shortly be banging on the door. For many people it was almost impossible to go through this entire process every evening as darkness began to descend, so they simply didn’t bother. Their windows remained covered, 24/7 as we’d say these days, for the duration of the war. I certainly don’t remember any of our upstairs windows ever being uncovered, though we had one window in the living-room which my dad relieved of it’s burden every morning before he left for work.

Equally needing to save their energy for all the other things demanded of them, shopkeepers often failed to remove much of the blackout covers when they opened their shops in the morning. They frequently had very little to sell anyway, so what did it matter? My very early memories of shopping with my mother provide vague glimpses of standing in line for what seemed to me to be the entire day, frequently – of course – in the rain. Finally gaining access beyond the dark doorway, we were encompassed in a cold gray gloom not much different from that outside. At least it was out of the rain, but as everyone in the crowded room was dripping water down onto the little toddler me, my environment seemed to have changed remarkably little. I would peer about me as my mother did, though I’m sure I had no idea what I was looking for.

“No bread today?” Mum gazed longingly at the rows of empty shelves behind the counter.

The exhausted-looking woman at the till shook her head.

“Just sold the last one Luv, sorry. Out of flour now so God knows when I’ll have more.

And so the dark days days went by.

Because of Dad’s war work we lived fairly close to London at that time, but London was as dark, or probably from necessity even darker, than our nearby town. There was very little civilian traffic at the time, but all vehicles – military or not – was made to have all lights covered or painted black. This made what traffic there was, and the streets and roads themselves, extremely hazardous. In fact, at first more people were dying from traffic accidents than were being killed by the enemy. In the first month of The War alone, there had been 1130 road deaths attributed to the blackout.* The whole of Britain, at that time, was a very, very, dark place.

The War over, we were free to move as needed. My father felt obligated to move us in with his aging parents to help care for them, and so we landed in a remote sheep-farming part of the west of England. All national improvements had been delayed for years by The War, the preceding years of preparation for it, and the recovery from it. Our new home, like all those for many miles around it, had no running water and no gas or electricity. Artificial light came in the form of candles and ancient oil lamps. We had flashlights but batteries were strictly rationed and hard to come by so mostly they were useless. We might as well have remained in the blackout. Inside, the house was cold and dark and silent. Outside after dark there were no lights from neighboring windows to help guide your footsteps, and certainly no street lights. Well, there were no streets, just a quiet winding country road. I fell quite often while scurrying to the little shed at the far end of the garden in the middle of the night, especially if I had waited a little too long and was really having to hurry.

This darkness never bothered me. I loved living there. I don’t remember exactly but I think I was in high-school by the time we got indoor plumbing and electricity. My dad never once as far as I know, deigned to use the new indoor toilet. Neither of them liked the electric lights, which Mum described as “much too harsh and glaring”. She, an avid reader, was quickly seduced, however, by the length of time her tired eyes could pour over a book under this new glaring light versus peering shortsightedly at the pages in the dim gray/yellow light of the oil lamp. I certainly found it much easier to do my homework!

When I went off to Sheffield to college, I couldn’t sleep at first. The curtains of my little dorm room were thin and beige, doing little to keep out the light: light from street lights, light from houses and businesses, light from passing cars and trucks and buses. Of course the hustle and bustle and bright lights of a city still recovering from The War were nothing compared to that of cities today, but I found it overwhelming.

Of course I got used to it; learned to love it. Yet occasionally, still, I long for the silent darkness of my childhood. But I know that’s nothing but nostalgia, which can fool us all. If I were to return to that darkness, I would also be returning to the other, metaphorical, darkness. The darkness of ignorance. The darkness of not even knowing there were homosexuals in this world, and far, far, from the acceptance that I was one of them. No thanks, I’ll stay here in that “harsh and glaring” light and be grateful for it.

*https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2009/nov/01/blackout-britain-wartime

© November 2017

About the Author

I was born and raised in England. After graduation from college there, I moved to the U.S. and, having discovered Colorado, never left. I have lived in the Denver-Boulder area since 1965, working for 30 years at IBM. I married, raised four stepchildren, then got divorced after finally, in my forties, accepting myself as a lesbian. I have been with my wonderful partner Betsy for thirty years. We have been married since 2013.

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Heroes, by Gillian

With a great stretch of the imagination I just might be able to see myself having a momentary lapse of concentration and running into the burning building to rescue a baby. It would require my being carried away on a huge rush of adrenaline, plus the balance of my mind being temporarily disturbed, but it just might happen. Though, to be fair, I should add that this is more a statement a previous me might have made, rather than the current one. I cannot imagine myself actually running anywhere these days, and toddling into the flames does not ring with great promise.

The kind of heroism I can never envision for myself, however, is that which must endure: day after day, month after month, even year after year, perhaps for a lifetime. This kind of courage has always been around, still is, and, human kind being what it is, doubtless always will be. Those of our generation probably leap most easily to tales of derring-do from the Second World War for such stories of silent, unseen, unsung heroes. I don’t mean only the romantic figures of The Resistance, who certainly helped in the eventual Allied victory; but the many invisible, unseen, and mostly unheard-of men and women from all walks of life who risked their ordinary lives every ordinary day. Their names are unknown to most of us. Do you know the name of the owners of the attic where Ann Frank so famously hid? I don’t. Do the names Caecilia Loots, Irena Sendler, Giorgio Perlasca, Frank Foley mean anything to you; to me? Yet they are just four of the 26,000 people from 49 different countries to receive the honorific ‘Righteous Among Nations’; an award bestowed by Israel on non-Jewish people who saved Jewish lives during the holocaust. And that doesn’t count all the non-Jews saved from the Nazis. And just think how countless many other simple saviors there must have been, who have slipped unacknowledged into the past

Le Chambon-sur-Lignon was a Protestant village in a predominantly Roman Catholic region of southern France. The village became a hiding place for Jews from every part of Europe. Between 1940 and 1944, Le Chambon and other nearby villages provided refuge for more than 5,000 people fleeing Nazi persecution, about 3,500 of whom were Jewish. (The exact numbers are, understandably, uncertain.) For four years, these people went about their daily lives, acting normally, while every single day they were at risk of discovery which would doubtless lead to torture and eventual death. How did they do that, these silent, invisible, unsung heroes? Where do you find that kind of ceaseless courage? In this community, also of around 5,000 people, no-one gave away any secrets either on purpose or accidentally. In 1943, the Nazis offered a reward for the local Minister who had been forced to go into hiding. Most of the population, including many children, knew where he was, but nobody talked. The Minister’s cousin, who ran the local orphanage, was arrested in 1943 and sent to Buchenwald where he died. And still they continued their dangerous efforts. It was long after the war that this village’s exploits became known, and then no-one wanted credit. They did what they did, as did all those on the ‘Righteous Among Nations’ list, along with so many unknown others, for no other reason than it was the right thing to do.

Raised, as I was, in post-war Britain, I grew up with exaggerated, lurid, fiction versions of such heroic escape stories. Naturally, in my youth, I fantasized. I became my own secret, silent, unsung hero engineering miraculous escapes at great personal risk. But in reality I think I always questioned how brave I would really be under such circumstances. Would you really risk torture and death for others, strangers who meant nothing to you? I asked myself. Reluctantly, I was forced to face doubts as to my own courage.

Now, since the election of the Orange Oligarch, I unwittingly and unwillingly find that I am asking myself those same questions again – for the first time in over fifty years. No, I am not so far fallen into fear that I imagine myself facing some modern version of storm troupers and the gestapo. Though my insides do double back flips as I say that, so apparently I am not quite as sure of it as I would wish to be. Also, I am confident that most residents of Germany in the early 1930’s would have said the same thing, which does not exactly fill me with confidence for our future.

In fact, since the election, I have a general, unformed, non-specific, fear which manifests as a cold hard lump of ice somewhere deep in my gut. I know that it is actually made up of a myriad of ‘what ifs’, which for the most part I just ignore. I have struggled along in this life long enough to know that letting those ‘what ifs’ crowd my every waking moment is not in any way a good thing. I go on with my life. But that cold hard fear remains.

So perhaps it is better, once in a while, to look closely at those ‘what ifs’ and test their validity.

Perhaps, when waved about in the fresh air, they will disintegrate. Vanish. Gingerly I reach deep down into my psyche and bring them out.

There is an outer ring of somewhat general fears. What if, as seems increasingly likely, we start a war? Multiple wars? What if, as seems increasingly likely, we deny the reality of climate change? What if, as seems increasingly likely, our economy crashes in burning rubble about our feet? Or what if, as some pundits insist, the economy will grow exponentially under the guidance of the Orange Ogre: most people’s lives become better. Life is good. Then we’re back to Germany in 1933: a booming economy, a better life for all. Well, no, not for all. But let’s not notice who has to pay the price as long as we’re all doing so well.

Those are not the ‘what ifs’ which really haunt me. They are too big: too unmanageable, beyond my capacity to fix. All I can do is make phone calls, write letters, protest, and generally try to turn the oncoming tide.

But the inner layer of ‘what ifs’, they squeeze my very soul. They ask about me. What will I do?

I am in control of my responses. Will I be my own silent invisible unsung hero?

That can be as simple as voting for, or encouraging action that is, the right thing to do but against our better interests. A few days ago, one of the endless on-line petitions I was asked to sign was urging Mayor Hancock to make Denver a Sanctuary City, as so many in the U.S. have done.

To my shame, I hesitated. The ‘Orrible Orange has threatened to cut off all Federal Funding to communities so designated. I am not sure, without some research, what exactly that would mean. But I am sure that one of the fastest-growing cities in this country would certainly have to tighten it’s belt. I added my name. But the hesitation, over such a small thing, once again made me question the courage of my convictions.

When that list of Muslims becomes a reality, will I really, as I now so glibly promise, add my name to it without knowing the consequences? Or worse, when I know that there will be very dire consequences? Will I do my part to make the list as meaningless as the Danes made the Jew’s yellow star during the war, when everyone wore one?

I honestly don’t know.

When it is forbidden for Muslims to enter the Mosque, will I walk beside them facing being beaten or shot by the riot police? Or will I cower at home and stare in fear and shame at the stories unfolding on TV?

I honestly don’t know.

When Mike Pence, our bigoted, homophobic, VP, has pushed our legislators into outlawing any gathering of GLBT people, will this group continue? Will we meet right here in this room, waiting for the enforcers of the law to burst through that door, guns blazing; or at best to haul us all off to prison? Or will we continue to meet, but secretly, in a different location each week so we don’t get caught? And will I be with you? Or will I slink away silently into the darkness to hide, to keep my head down at home; not the silent invisible unsung hero of my dreams but the silent invisible non-hero of my ‘what ifs’?

I honestly don’t know.

Right now, my very best hope for the future is that I am never forced to find out.

© January 2017

About the Author 

I was born and raised in England. After graduation from college there, I moved to the U.S. and, having discovered Colorado, never left. I have lived in the Denver-Boulder area since 1965, working for 30 years at IBM. I married, raised four stepchildren, then got divorced after finally, in my forties, accepting myself as a lesbian. I have been with my wonderful partner Betsy for thirty years. We have been married since 2013.

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Here and There, by Gillian

Here and There 

(Or, as my mum would have said, hither and thither!)

The American doughboys marched off cheerily to World War One singing, over there, over there, the Yanks are coming, the Yanks are coming, and we won’t come back till it’s over, over there.

By the time it was over over there, 120,000 of them could not come back. Before long the Yanks were coming once more, for the second Big One, and by the time that one was over over there, almost half a million Americans could not come back. Over there can be deadly.

There was a saying in Britain at the end of World War Two. The only problem with the Yanks is, they’re over sexed, over paid, and over here. That seems almost incredibly unappreciative of men who, almost certainly, saved Britain from being invaded by Hitler and his Nazi thugs. It is understandable, though, that returning British men felt considerable resentment. Many returned to wives raising G.I. babies, or wives wanting a divorce because this poor embattled war weary Brit. could never measure up to that beautiful boy from Biloxi with his easy charm and an apparently endless supply of chocolate, American cigarets, and ready cash. They returned to girlfriends and fiancées who had their bags packed ready for an immediate escape to join that friendly fruit farmer in Florida, or some rugged Wyoming cowboy. There and here is not always an easy mix.

I, born in Britain in 1942, sometimes have to wonder what my life would have been, had the U.S. not joined the Allies in World War Two: different, for sure. Much shorter, perhaps. Having said that, it’s difficult for me to take the stand of an isolationist. But let’s face it, since World War Two, our military forays in foreign fields have not …. well, let’s be kind and simply say, not been all that we’d hoped for. Though exactly what we had hoped for, from Viet Nam to Iraq and Afghanistan, seems pitifully unclear. Over there can be confusing.

The United States, being an immigrant country, is peopled by those who, themselves or their not too distant ancestors, came from there to here – ‘there’ being just about anywhere in the world.

Some, tragically, came involuntarily, and experienced nothing good here. But for most of us who chose to come from over there to over here, it was a good move and we found the good life here, the life we wanted. People occasionally ask me if I would ever want to move back to England, and I surprise myself by thinking, not unless I can go back to the time of my youth there. I know that’s not an honest response, even silently in my own head. That was, after all, the Britain that I chose not to remain in. Nostalgia has been so aptly described as the longing for a place and time that never was. In my heart I know that if some magical time travel were possible, and I could return to the Britain of my youth, I would return happily to the here and now, saying, with that smugness we sometimes feel on returning home from vacation,

“Great place to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live there!”

No, my life is here and now. I’m here to stay.

© May 2015

About the Author

I was born and raised in England. After graduation from college there, I moved to the U.S. and, having discovered Colorado, never left. I have lived in the Denver-Boulder area since 1965, working for 30 years at IBM. I married, raised four stepchildren, then got divorced after finally, in my forties, accepting myself as a lesbian. I have now been with my wonderful partner Betsy for 25 years.

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Practical Joke by Carlos

There are some things that a man who
has carried a weapon into battle never shares with others, keeping it confined
perhaps out of fear that to unlock it from his soul will unleash a tragic truth
about himself.
When I was a about ten, my uncle, a
veteran who had lost his innocence in World War II and later in the Korean War,
took me to see Pork Chop Hill, an
enactment of a battle fought during the Korean conflict. I hated the savagery,
the brutal, bestial violence. I emerged from the theater angry at my uncle for exposing
me to such a film, one that I later realized had a potential to leave
psychologically scars. It wasn’t until I learned to think like an adult that I
realized that my uncle, who never ever spoke of the carnage and butchery he, no
doubt, had experienced, had attempted to share with me his painful past, a
secret he could never  entrust to an
adult. In retrospect, I understood why over time he chose to drink himself to
death. As for my biological father, who also fought in the Pacific front during
the Second World War, he too never ever spoke of his experiences as a sailor
out at sea. When he returned from action on the frontline, he floundered
aimlessly, angrily. Years later, he married my pregnant mother a day shy of my
birth, no doubt in a guilt-ridden attempt to legitimize me, and maybe himself.
When my mother died, at her request, he summarily relinquished me to his
parents. I can only imagine what goes on in a woman’s mind when she cannot
trust her child to his father. Though I would meet with him on occasion when I
was growing up, I hated those awkward, silent moments, punctuated with heated rants.
He was so temperamental, so unrefined, that I subconsciously decided to slough
off any residual part of him, endeavoring to be everything he never was. Again,
it wasn’t until later that I learned compassion, recognizing that the ghosts of
his past haunted him every moment of his life. I haven’t heard of him in years.
When I last saw him, he was a frail, disappointed man; who knows, perhaps he
has finally found peace in death. Interestingly, I learned only a couple of
years ago, quite by accident that I was named Carlos after my uncle; as for my
middle name, Manuel, I also learned it is my father’s middle name. Thus, as a
symbol of new beginnings and hopes, I bore the names of two men who shared a
common core, a source I too would someday encounter. As for the parents who
raised me, being that they were undocumented Americans, they felt more
comfortable cocooned in the Spanish-speaking barrios of west Texas.
Nevertheless, believing in the American dream and realizing that their two sons
had had little choice of a future, all their dreams were placed upon me
becoming an educated man, a man who could pick from the sweetest fruit on the
tree. They never attempted to dissuade me from what in retrospect were obvious
gay inclinations, my poetic nature, my love of gardening and cooking, my
relative lack of male-centered interests. I was never cautioned to be anything
but myself, the antithesis of what my uncle and father had been, products of a
war-burdened society.  No doubt, they
must have been devastated when I was drafted during the conflagration of
another war. I considered only briefly the thought of dodging the draft by
declaring my homosexuality, that aberration that was still viewed with disgust
but which would have provided me with a different hand with which to play.
Instead, I answered the call to duty, mostly out of a misguided belief that to
fail to answer was inconceivable to the men in my family. Thus, once again, my
parents managed to bestow a blessing to another son whose destiny was thwarted
by a different war where young men were sacrificed for old, rich men’s egos. My
parents’ only solace was that God would be merciful and that their prayers to
the saint-of-the-month would be answered as they had been answered before.
However, the practical joke was on them since each son returned transformed by the
cesspools in which he had trudged. To this day, I am very selective of sharing the
details of the endless nights holding onto the earth out of fear that if I
didn’t, she would gather me in an intimate embrace. Suffice to say, that I proved
myself as an American, perhaps more so than some, regardless of whether I wash
my face or not.
During basic training at Fort Ord on
the Monterey Peninsula in California, I learned to meditate, to embrace my
surroundings even as I was transformed into a hesitant warrior. By encasing
myself into my poetic chrysalis, I sought to keep my keel intact, ensuring that
I would not lose myself as my uncle and father had a generation before. I
followed the rules of the game, practicing at playing soldier while nurturing a
yet indefinable core within me. We were frightened young men, a microcosm of an
America of the time seething with rage due to inequities of race and class.
Most of us suspected, though we never admitted, we were fodder cast into the fire
pit, expendable. Some, a few courageous souls I prefer to believe, chose to
swallow spit and reject the attempt to mold them into combatants. Of course,
I’ll never know whether they were self-actualized men who chose to act on their
convictions or defeated boys who weren’t up to the task. Regardless, they were
summarily dishonorably discharged. For days before their departure, however, they
were made to sit in front of the barracks facing the platoon in formation
before them as though they were on trial for crimes against humanity; it was
part of the psychological charade to which they, and we, were subjected. It was
an attempt to portray them as pathetic, emasculated boys unworthy of another’s
compassion. Nevertheless, I would look at them with respect, acknowledging that
every path has a puddle. When we were compelled to run with full gear, to the
point that I felt my chest heaving with pain, but didn’t want to be singled out
as the runt of the litter, I would look at the thick carpet of invading ice
plant thriving on the sand dunes and find solace in the tenacity of their being,
and I would keep running. When instructed on how to use the M-16, I would cast
glances across the bay and its icy waters and remind myself that someday I
would have to wade into the ocean to be restored. And when I was compelled to listen
to marching chants pregnant with vile racist words in an attempt to dehumanize
the VC, I prayed we’d all be forgiven.
Years later, upon completion of my
tour of duty, I returned back home to Texas. On the bus home, ironically I was
asked for my identity papers by an immigration inspector in New Mexico in spite
of my being in full dress military uniform. I guess, my face was still a little
dirty. Later, my fellow veterans and I were stigmatized by some of our
countrymen as rapists, My Lai baby killers, addicts, and pawns of the
establishment. Thus, I chose to silence my voice and deny my past. I managed not
only to survive but to thrive in spite of those moments and the moments that
followed. Because I was gay, a poet, a former soldier, I learned from fallen
warriors before me. Unlike my uncle, I’ve never been self-destructive; unlike
my father, although I have my moments of melancholy, I am essentially whole.
And unlike my parents, I don’t hold my hands in my lap and ask the saints to
intervene when a force larger than myself confronts me. I discovered it is
easier to control the amount of salt that goes into a dish than to try to scoop
it out when the dish is oversalted. I’ve learned that though there are some
things a man who has carried a weapon into battle never shares with another, he
must find the resolve which can only come from within himself to approach those
time bombs and diffuse them, thus turning the tables on the practical joke of
fate.

©
November, 2015, Denver 

About the Author 

Cervantes wrote, “I know who I am and who I may choose to be.”  In spite of my constant quest to live up to this proposition, I often falter.  I am a man who has been defined as sensitive, intuitive, and altruistic, but I have also been defined as being too shy, too retrospective, too pragmatic.  Something I know to be true. I am a survivor, a contradictory balance of a realist and a dreamer, and on occasions, quite charming.  Nevertheless, I often ask Spirit to keep His arms around my shoulder and His hand over my mouth.  My heroes range from Henry David Thoreau to Sheldon Cooper, and I always have time to watch Big Bang Theory or Under the Tuscan Sun.  I am a pragmatic romantic and a consummate lover of ideas and words, nature and time.  My beloved husband and our three rambunctious cocker spaniels are the souls that populate my heart. I could spend the rest of my life restoring our Victorian home, planting tomatoes, and lying under coconut palms on tropical sands.  I believe in Spirit, and have zero tolerance for irresponsibility, victim’s mentalities, political and religious orthodoxy, and intentional cruelty.  I am always on the look-out for friends, people who find that life just doesn’t get any better than breaking bread together and finding humor in the world around us.